Recipe: Christmas Red Velvet Cupcakes

Cupcakes for Party is so delighted to bring you a recipe article from a genuinely cool blog: Well Fed, Flat Broke. The blogger can manage to make her readers smile amusingly.

The recipe is of non-traditional Christmas red velvet cupcakes with raspberry jam in the cake ingredients and with vanilla bean icing instead of cream cheese frosting.

The accompanying photo, by Flickr user Sugar Daze, is, however, of classic and traditional Christmas red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and with no fruit jam in the cake.

Cupcakes for Party just wants you readers to view the two different versions at once. One version in text, and the other version in photo ...

Red Velvet Cupcakes with Vanilla Bean Icing
Purists will be all, "jam in red velvet? Regular old icing? The hell?" But that's okay. Real red velvet cake would be frosted with cream cheese icing. But I didn't have cream cheese, and this ended up working well enough that I am not going to steer you in a different direction just for tradition's sake, though you're welcome to go there if you'd like. Also, pretty as it is, I am just too hippified to dye something red without it tasting like red also … so I added the jam. You don't have to. But make these cupcakes. They are light and sweet and unusual, with cocoa used more as a spice than as something to turn something else into chocolate. They're perfect treats that fit into eager little hands, and they're pretty and will certainly stand out on a dessert table. Happy holidays!

INGREDIENTS
for the cupcakes
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp. cocoa powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup buttermilk
2 tbsp. liquid red food coloring
2 tbsp. raspberry jam
1 tsp. white vinegar

for the icing
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 vanilla bean, scraped
3 cups confectioner's sugar

DIRECTIONS
for the cupcakes
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line muffin tins with cupcake wrappers.

Whisk together flour, salt, cocoa, and baking soda. In a separate bowl, cream butter and sugar until smooth, then beat in eggs and vanilla. Combine with flour mixture, adding buttermilk, food colouring, raspberry jam, and vinegar. Mix well.

Pour batter into lined muffin tins. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until cake springs back when pressed gently with a pointer finger.

Cool on wire racks, and then frost with icing.

for the icing
Mix ingredients together … when it resembles frosting, use it; adjust consistency with confectioner's sugar or cold milk as needed.

Recipe adapted from Red Velvet Cake Recipe & Video.

- Recipe Article: altered version licensed under a CC BY-SA 2.5 CA license
- Image: licensed under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license